Coastal Resilience

Working in partnership with independent researcher, educator and artist Natalia Eernstman we’re seeking to utilise novel and creative techniques to help support and identify greater engagement, empowerment, collaboration and capacity within our local community.

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Natalia’s work aims to dynamically, efficiently and effectively respond to change: unleashing and unlocking the latent capacities, skills, knowledges, stories and histories, within coastal communities.

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The knowledge gained will help to create more resilient, sustainable and prosperous local communities; reducing dependencies on authorities that are struggling to respond to existing, let alone future, demand.

In February 2014 Cornwall showed what amazing things a community can achieve when it works together. The stage will culminate in the development of a number of contemporary sea shanties by gathering, telling and singing the stories of how communities are affected by and can respond to extreme weather.

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A short video is available here detailing the Storm Songs story. Storm Songs

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Stage 2: Devising and performing community dialogues for resilience

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In this stage a group of community and professional performers will collectively devise a performance piece, drawing from their own experiences and the stories of others. We will explore the topic through 6 points of reference: fishing, policy, nature and deep time, personal decisions and agency, defence and harbour, climate science. The sequence of workshops will include site visits, input of key people in communities, and forum practices in the studios. The performance will be a site-specific promenade piece, leading an audience (residents, academics, policy-makers, visitors etc) on a journey through Porthleven, and engaging them in a solution-oriented dialogue.

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Stage 3: Cross-cultural connections

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The Kenyan performers, engaged through the AXA Outlook project, will be involved in a 3-day knowledge exchange programme between Cornish performers, artists working in landscape of changing coastlines, resilience scholars and ESI researchers; the outcomes of which are to explore cross-cultural approaches and lessons in building community resilience informing the output of Stage 5.

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Stage 4: Extracting lesson learnt and dissemination

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Creation of a film and guidance for use by communities, agencies and policy makers working broadly across coastal resilience, detailing the methodological outcomes of the project and its activities, supporting replication in communities not directly engaged in the project. Such tools will be supportive in enabling users to better engage with challenges of coastal resilience in local Neighbourhood and Emergency Planning.